We knew Michael Gross's exposé of the Metropolitan Museum of Art would ruffle feathers. It's juicy stuff, clearly. But we didn't expect it would be banned. But that's what seems to be happening. The Independent reports that Amazon's British arm has stopped selling Gross's Rogues' Gallery "for fear of action from a libel tourist," namely Annette de la Renta, the museum vice chair and wife of designer Oscar de la Renta, who has threatened Gross with a libel suit. The ban isn't limited to foreign retail outlets, however.

This New York Times front-page story is about how the Amazon Kindle can't pronounce Barack Obama's name. That's A1 news? Really? The Times really is just a fancy blog. (Or maybe just feeling defensive.)

• Walt Disney reported that profits plunged 46% last quarter. [Variety, WSJ]
• Mort Zuckerman's plan to save newspapers involves bingo. Really! [NYM]
• The New York Times Co. has reached a deal with the unions at the Boston Globe, although it may take a few weeks to vote on the compromise. [E&P]
• NBC's Washington headquarters is contaminated with asbestos! [NYO]
• Tricky Dylan Ratigan isn't joining ABC after all. He's going to MSNBC. [Gawker]
• Michael Wolff may hate the New York Times, but if it weren't for the Times, he'd probably have nothing to rant about on his unknown website. [HP]
• Amazon unveiled its fancy, new Kindle reader today. [NYT, E&P]

What madness is this: some joker is selling a used copy of Page Sixer Paula Froelich's not-released-yet book for $81.18, on Amazon. Coincidentally, that was GM's average hourly wage in 2006. "Coincidentally." [Amazon]

• Hachette is cutting salaries and asking staff to work overtime. Fun! [Gawker]
• Amazon is blaming an "embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error" for the dropping the sales rankings of thousands of gay and lesbian books. [AFP]
• Bravo has picked up four new shows, including one produced by Sarah Jessica Parker and another by Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher. [THR, THR]
• NBC's Boston affiliate, WHDH, has backed down from its threat to skip Jay Leno's new 10pm show when it debuts this fall. [B&C]
• Marriott will no longer automatically provide guests with a free copy of USA Today or the Journal. You're gonna have to ask for it from now on. [E&P]

• Amazon.com is in the hot seat for stripping gay and lesbian books of their sales rankings, something the bookseller is now calling a "glitch." [EW, WSJ]
• MSNBC is reportedly in the process of developing a weekend political show to be moderated by chief White House correspondent Chuck Todd. [NYO]
• More bad news for barely-living BlackBook: its longtime fashion director is out. And Jann Wenner's marketing chief is leaving Wenner Media. [WWD]
• Alpha Media has laid off a handful of employees at Maxim, including deputy editor Chris Wilson and editor-at-large Steve Garbarino. [NYO]
• Magazines are looking to raise subscription rates to save themselves. [NYT]

Rachel Maddow, who basically everyone wants to hang out with, lost one of her "mentioned by every damn interviewer" quirks recently, when she got drunk and bought a TV.

• NBC chief Jeff Zucker says that despite the fact Jim Cramer got his ass handed to him last week by Jon Stewart, it's had absolutely no impact on CNBC. Believe that and you may also be willing to buy that everything's perfect at MSNBC and NBC, and Zucker has a perfect head of hair, too. [Portfolio, B&C]
• Crain Communications has cut 150 staffers and sliced salaries by 10%. [PC]
• Don Hewitt, the creator of 60 Minutes, is in the hospital with cancer. [Wow]
• Media advertising fell 2.6% in 2008, according to Nielsen. [B&C]
• Interview seems to be having financial difficulties. [Gawker]
• Discovery has filed a patent suit against Amazon over the Kindle. [WSJ]
• The Hills's Audrina Patridge has a reality show of her own in the works. [THR]
• CNN's Lou Dobbs is a racist. But you probably knew that already. [Gawker]

• The Wall Street Journal's new glossy mag, WSJ, will remain a quarterly and will not be going monthly as planned due to "market conditions." [WWD]
• Amazon is launching a program to let you read books by iPhone. [WSJ]
• Fox is ahead in the ratings with 18 to 49-year-olds thanks to the success of Idol, but CBS is gaining ground and is now No. 1 among total viewers. [LAT]
• As expected, Julius Genachowski has been nominated as FCC head. [AP]
• Cablevision will soon start targeting TV ads based on "income, ethnicity, gender or whether the homeowner has children or pets." [NYT]
• WNBC's new digital channel, New York Nonstop, launched Monday. [NYDN]
• David Carr's Carpetbagger blog will not be a year-round thing. [NYT]
• Good news, unemployed TV journalists: Dan Rather is hiring. [NYO]

♦ Details on the layoffs and management changes at Time Inc. [NYP]
♦ More on the demise of Maer Roshan's Radar and its God-awful TMZ-like reincarnation. [NYO, HuffPo]
♦ Fox News has apologized for putting a racist and anti-Semite on the air. [MM]
♦ Noted media expert (and former basketball player) Charles Barkley thinks Fox News is "corrupt." [B&C]
♦ Barack Obama's 30-minute infomercial airs tonight. [AdAge, Politico]

This morning, Steve Ballmer promised Windows Cloud, a set of Web-based applications that would enable "light editing" of MS Office docs and who knows what else — he didn't say. It's probably no coincidence that Amazon announced its own sort of Windows Cloud today: Customers will be able to run Windows Server and SQL Server via Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Amazon CTO Werner Vogels blogged an explanation:

Amazon.com's Video On Demand service, which allows you to preview and purchase streaming videos online, uses Adobe's Flash Media Server to deliver the video. Late last week, Reuters reported that hackers had discovered an exploit that would allow users to turn the free preview into the full stream, allowing folks to watch movies for free using software like Replay Media Catcher from Applian. Adobe took issue with Reuters' contention that Flash isn't secure — instead suggesting it was Amazon's fault for not enabling various security options such as streaming encryption and player verification. Why did Adobe choose to blame a customer instead of quietly fixing the problem behind the scenes? Probably seemed easier.

Most MySpace Music customers won't go searching for the obscure stuff. The big money is in pop hits. The industry's top 10 singles are all available to preview on MySpace Music — and they're all on Amazon.com's MP3 store as well. But that doesn't mean it's one-click easy to buy the music via MySpace. Trying to purchase downloads of 6 of the 10 directly from MySpace's new music widget failed. And those that worked required plenty of clicks and drop-down menus. [Idolator]

Click to viewThe latest shockumentary from portly auteur Michael Moore, Slacker Uprising, has launched today. To watch the film, you have to sign up with an email address. While Moore says his fans should go ahead and download it, there's no actual link to do that. And you can't embed the whole film on third-party sites without pulling some code from the bowels of the HTML source — which I've done here, while also restoring the "share" button so you can easily post it yourself wherever you like. Heck, if Moore just wants the film out there, why not distribute it on BitTorrent and save on bandwidth costs?Presumably because The Weinstein Company, Moore's studio, wouldn't want to be seen as somehow legitimizing file-sharing. And it would like to keep your email address on file, the better to flog paid downloads on Amazon.com and iTunes, as well as the DVD, when those are available. But really, Moore doesn't want to make a dime on this thing. He just wants you kids to get off your butts and vote. Free Internet distribution serves his political agenda; paid downloads serve Weinstein's commercial goals. With two masters to serve, is it any surprise Moore's film is making an awkward debut?

When it became obvious over the weekend that investment bank Lehman Brothers would finally fail and that no one was going to rescue it, Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain realized the market's reaction today would tank his company as well. So Thain met with Kenneth Lewis, CEO of Bank of America, and the pair reached a deal to sell Merrill Lynch to Bank of America for $44 billion. Which is, you might recall, around the price Microsoft wanted to pay for Yahoo. Of course, that kind of offer won't be coming for Yahoo again any time soon. While not so severely or directly, Lehman Brothers' collapse and insurance giant AIG's tottering on the brink will affect your tech portfolio today. Before this morning's open the company's stock was already down 3.83 percent on premarket trading. Watch Yahoo and nine other tech stock's continuing destruction or — dare you hope? — miraculous resilience on live stock charts below.Click to view

Amazon.com plans to start selling wine later this year, now that the bans on out-of-state wine shipments to New York and Michigan have been struck down. Amazon will only be selling selections from California, so if you're into French or Italian varieties, you're out of luck. Oh, and no hard stuff. Just wine. You'll still have to head to your local liquor store for your vodka in plastic jugs. [WSJ]

Kindlespotting continues, with a reader sending us this picture of a reader on a flight from Dallas to San Francisco. Considering how much the e-book readers cost and the premium prices for the content, you'd think this reader would be in first class — then again, after paying Amazon $359 plus shipping for the gadget, maybe all he could afford was coach. Go on, write a better caption in the comments. Best one will become the new headline. Yesterday's winner in our very special caption contest: "And now that I've had Firefox dig this hole in the desert for me..." by Beachfront_Perk.

• Temasek, Singapore's sovereign wealth fund, has "great confidence" in Merrill CEO John Thain. [Bloomberg]

At some point in your professional life as a media person, have you come into contact with Rielle Hunter, mistress of disgraced ex-presidential candidate John Edwards? Now is your chance to cash in! Hunter, as we've learned, has led a long and storied life among artists, writers, and men she sleeps with in the hopes that they're "powerful." One such man was Jay McInerney, who used a thinly fictionalized Hunter as the narrator of one of his "novels" (like Tumblrs but longer and on paper). That novel, the mostly forgotten Story of My Life, has just been reprinted and is fast climbing the Amazon sales charts. It's currently 226 at the internet bookseller. Last week it was, like, nowhere. Will all these voracious new readers enjoy the book? Michiko Kakutani didn't like it that much back in 1988. (Her review is also an awesome early example of her insane obsession with comparing every jaded young protagonist to Holden fucking Caulfield. Haven't you read like a million books, Michiko?? Find one more example of an adolescent narrator please!)

Amazon.com beat Wall Street expectations in reporting its second-quarter earnings today. Profits were up 41 percent to $158 million, compared with $78 million during the second quarter last year. Revenues hit $4.06 billion, better than the $3.95 billion expected by Wall Street analysts. Shares up are 3 percent in afternoon trading. [Reuters]